


carry them forward

by wafflelate



Category: Dreaming of Sunshine - Silver Queen, Naruto
Genre: Fuuinjutsu, Gen, Mistakes, Seals (Ambiguous), Tenten (Naruto)-centric, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-04-06 19:44:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19069414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wafflelate/pseuds/wafflelate
Summary: "I made a mistake," Tenten admits. She's glad she's had a lot of practice keeping her voice level. This is already embarrassing enough."Yes," the Yondaime says, slowly. "That's a word for it. Have you been born yet?"





	carry them forward

**Author's Note:**

  * For [elegantstupidity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elegantstupidity/gifts).



> Thanks for requesting Tenten, recip! There's one reference to Dreaming of Sunshine by Silver Queen in here but I kept it nice and vague for you so it shouldn't read like a recursive fic. I might change the fandom to "Dreaming of Sunshine - Silver Queen" later; if so don't be alarmed.

Tenten stands up very straight. And careful. And nervous. 

In front of her, Namikaze Minato sits at a desk. The desk that Tenten privately thinks of as _The Desk_. He's not wearing the hat, at least, but behind him out the windows the village is all spread out, half of it covered by the shadow of the mountain. Everything about it is slightly off, just left of center, but that's probably just the time distance. 

She's almost fourteen years in the past. Of course the village doesn't look the same. 

"I made a mistake," Tenten admits. She's glad she's had a lot of practice keeping her voice level. This is already embarrassing enough. 

"Yes," the Yondaime says, slowly. "That's a word for it. Have you been born yet?" 

"Yes, Yondaime-sama," Tenten says. Knowing that there's two of her alive at the same time feels _weird_ , but what's _weirder_ is that she's pretty sure Gai-sensei is _her_ age right now. He's _Lee-sized_ , and probably louder than Tenten's ever considered he could be. 

"That complicates things. Who taught you?" The Yondaime is paging through her notes, now, both the ones she had with her when she arrived and everything she scribbled out in T&I before she convinced them that she wasn't just an incredibly terrible infiltrator trying to get by on bullshit. 

"Kind of no one?" But that's not exactly true. "Well, my jōnin-sensei — Maito Gai — taught me explosive tags and some specialized storage seals. Everything else... I just kind of fiddled?" 

"You fiddled. With the Hiraishin." 

Tenten shrugs uncomfortably. "Um, yes. Sorry." 

The Yondaime frowns down at her notes again for a long, _long_ moment. Tenten thinks he must have had some time before she came up here to read them, so maybe it's just for show, but whether he's really reading them or not, just having them in his hands makes her skin crawl a little. She knows that everything she wrote down is probably wrong. If it were _right_ she would have appeared on the other side of the training field, taking Neji by surprise for once in her life. 

Okay, well, she _did_ appear on the other side of the training field. Technically. Just, not exactly at the time she meant to do so. Tenten would consider her punctuality a strength, usually, but if there _is_ such a thing as 'too early', this is probably the very definition of it. 

"I would have expected your teacher to give you a more thorough explanation of time/space seals and jutsu experimentation protocols before letting you work on your own with anything this complex." The Yondaime flicks through he notes one last time and then finally looks up at her. "You should really have learned basic summoning techniques before even thinking of approaching the Hiraishin. How did you even get your hands on it?" 

The gaze he pins her with isn't one of idle curiosity, but instead a powerful ninja wondering just how their secret technique landed in the hands of a no-family-name orphan like Tenten. 

"One of my friends brought a kunai back from Land of Stone," Tenten says. "It was — it was stuck in some wall there. No one else knew I had it." 

If they had, they would have taken it away. 

The pressure of the Yondaime's gaze lessens. His intent draws back under his skin, and Tenten remembers to breathe. 

"Well, then," the Yondaime says. "We'll just have to work out exactly what you did and then see if you can do it backwards. Until then, you'll have to remain in custody." He gives her a sympathetic smile. "Don't worry, though, we'll take care of you. You're one of my ninja, even if you're a little lost." 

She hasn't yet been able to tell anyone that Namikaze Minato won't even last out the year under the hat. No one's asked her about that kind of thing, and Tenten doesn't know how to just spit it out. 

Tenten is escorted back to T&I, but this time instead of a blank room with a table and chairs bolted to the chair, it's a small room with adjoining bathroom. There's a desk, and a real chair, and a cot. She's left alone with copies of her notes — the Yondaime has elected to keep the originals, apparently — and a few pens. 

"Don't use any chakra," says one of the chūnin who escorted her. Then Tenten is alone again, with her mostly-useless notes. 

There are some calculations she's been meaning to do to make the chakra conversion in her weapon seals a little smoother, allowing for less chakra smoke and therefore being less wasteful. They're so complex it's a little horrific to imagine doing them without a calculator, but it's better than doing _nothing_ and doesn't require chakra or catastrophizing. Just numbers and scrap paper. It fills the time. 

Tenten had been the top kunoichi in her class. She could have chosen to count beans or practice diplomacy, sort paperwork or solve puzzles. The rasp of paper wouldn't be satisfying, the depths of cryptography aren't lauded, and most importantly nothing but healing or killing earns you a reputation in Konoha. Gai-sensei says her accuracy will be an excellent asset, that she's a "strong, stunning example of Konoha strength" and will soon be a "magnificent blossom" in Konoha's bouquet — which is nice, probably the nicest thing any adult has ever said about Tenten, but it still feels like she's falling short. 

Flinging herself into the past as the result of jutsu experimentation she was apparently nowhere near ready for just feels like the latest in a long step of mistakes, and worst of all she can't even get her math to come out right today. Tenten had bought herself a calculator with the money from Team Gai's first C-rank, and apparently that means her brain has melted to mush in the meantime and she can no longer do anything complex without it. 

Damnit. 

Tenten folds her arms on the desk and then lowers her head to rest against them. She'd slept the same way in T&I and it had been hellishly uncomfortable, but the cot across the room is just too far away. She'll get up and move over there in a minute. 

The door opens. Time has passed, but Tenten isn't sure how much. The Yondaime is standing in the doorway, looking back out into the hall. "Don't be ridiculous," he tells someone. "Wait out here." Then he steps inside and the door shuts behind him. 

The Yondaime is carrying a tray with two takeout bowls covered with plastic. 

"Curry?" she asks hopefully. Curry makes everything better. It's cheap, it's warm, and most importantly it reminds her of her team. Tenten needs a little of Neji and Lee's attitudes to carry her through this — spite towards anyone and anything that might get in her way, a complete refusal to accept failure. 

"Ramen," the Yondaime says, after a pause. He sounds... almost apologetic. "I'll make sure you get curry next time, though. That shouldn't be too hard." He sets the tray down on the desk as soon as Tenten sweeps her notes into a neater pile. His eyes flicker across her bungled calculations, but he doesn't say anything about them, thankfully. 

Tenten's not sure she could take that. 

"Ah, I mean, any food is good," she adds hastily, accepting the still-hot bowl from the Yondaime with unfeigned gratitude. T&I hadn't been exactly forthcoming with hot meals. Or, well, any meals at all. Tenten is starving, although her anxiety and panic had kind of made her forget that thought for the past... however many days she's been in interrogation. 

She cracks open the lid and a wave of delicious, brothy steam hits her face. "Ichiraku," she says, because it _must_ be. Tenten doesn't go there much, but nothing in the world smells like Ichiraku Ramen. 

"Everyone likes Ichiraku," the Yondaime says. He opens his own bowl. 

For a moment they eat in silence, and Tenten has to work hard to keep from shoveling food into her face as fast as it can possibly go. 

When both of their bowls are down to dregs, the Yondaime says, "I forgot to tell you that you'd make a good sealing master if you had a little more instruction. If you learn enough to keep from killing yourself. Maito Gai must be an enthusiastic teacher, even if he has neglected some areas of your sealing knowledge. If you ask him—" 

"He's already taught me everything he knows!" Tenten bursts out, and then rocks back in her chair a little, mortified by her own outburst. It probably counts as backtalk and it was definitely rude, but — but — well, she can't just let people talk about Gai-sensei like that. He's _the best_. He believes in her. If he knew anything about summoning seals, he would have taught that to her, too, but that's the kind of specialized sealing knowledge that usually only gets passed down within clans or in formal apprenticeships. 

It's not Gai's fault that Tenten has no connections to learn what she wants to know and has instead just been stumbling blindly through the art of sealing like she stumbled through learning how to make a budget, learning how to fix her apartment's crappy stove, learning how to move on from Academy friends who couldn't understand why she'd want to stick with Team Gai. 

The Yondaime looks over her carefully, sets his bowl down. "He's not a sealing master." 

"No," Tenten agrees. "He just — he just learned some things to pass on to me. Because I needed them. I was just... experimenting on my own." To keep up with her teammates. To keep up with the crazy rookies who graduated the year after her. To keep up with her expectations for herself. Because Tenten wants recognition. Tenten wants a less shitty apartment, and Tenten wants to make a mark on the world. Because Gai had looked at her and wanted _her_ for his team, not anyone else, even though he could have had any of the dozen other kids who'd graduated alongside Tenten and Neji and Lee. Tenten has nothing to live up to but that just means she needs to reach higher, because there's no one to give her a leg up. 

"You're even better than I gave you credit for." He looks a little embarrassed. "You're actually brilliant, if you really mean that you weren't taught anything but sealing scrolls and explosive tags. Huh." 

He shoves the tray and the bowls aside and gestures for her to hand her copy of the sealing notes over. She gives them to him and then just stares at him blankly for awhile, trying to figure out if he'd _really_ said she was 'brilliant'. Namikaze Minato thinks she's brilliant. Even though all he knows about her is that she's undereducated for the technique she was trying to perform. 

"I didn't really look at your storage scroll notes," the Yondaime confesses. "It's a backwards way to approach the Hiraishin." He flips through her notes, and lands on the first page of her Hiraishin notes, which are all mixed in with plans for a new kind of storage seal Tenten sometimes fantasizes about being able to create. "Walk me through this from the beginning. Maybe we'll get you home a little faster, and when we do you can ask me for real lessons." 

Tenten should tell him. She should spit out that he's head, that he's _going_ to die. She should tell him about the Kyūbi attack. But... he hasn't asked. He's probably waiting to earn her trust first. So maybe not until after they've talked over her notes. She's not likely to get another chance like this. 

**Author's Note:**

> “Well, we all make mistakes, dear, so just put it behind you. We should regret our mistakes and learn from them, but never carry them forward into the future with us.” ― L.M. Montgomery


End file.
